مطالب

Background: Researchers have always been interested in the focus of attention and the quiet eye. However, the effect of distance of attentional strategy in different anxiety conditions has remained unclear.Aim: The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of attentional strategies on gaze behavior and the performance of dart throwing in novices under anxiety conditions.Materials and Methods: The participants were 42 female, Alzahra University students, aged 18-35 years. Participants with high trait anxiety (score higher than 24) were excluded using the Sports Competition Anxiety Test through a state anxiety questionnaire. Participants were randomly divided into two groups of high and low-trait anxiety. They performed the dart-throwing task counterbalanced in four different attention strategies (distal external attention, proximal external attention, internal attention, and control). The participants in the high-anxiety group were told that if they performed each throw correctly, they would receive a cash prize, and the low-anxiety group performed the throwing without anxiety and any instruction. At the same time as dart throwing, gaze behavior data was recorded with an eye tracker device. After the anxiety manipulation, the individual's anxiety was measured with Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2.Results: The results showed that the low-anxiety group performed better than the high-anxiety group (P=0.01). Also, external attention had a lower radial error in both high and low-anxiety groups. No significant difference was found in the average duration and number of fixations between different attentional strategies and groups. The comparison of the mean showed that in the low anxiety group, the fixation duration in the external attention strategy was longer, and in the high anxiety group, the fixation duration in the external attention and control strategies was longer than other strategies.Conclusion: The present study supported the preplanning hypothesis, attentional control theory, and inhibition hypothesis, but was inconsistent with the restricted action hypothesis. These results showed the importance of the effect of anxiety on gaze behavior and performance in directing future research.

Background: This study addresses the challenge of enhancing selective attention in skilled badminton players, a critical cognitive skill for optimal performance, by investigating the combined effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and mindfulness training.Aim: The present study was conducted to investigated the effects of a tDCS-mindfulness program on selective attention in skilled badminton players.Materials and Methods: Thirty-six male badminton players (mean age= 23.78±3.09 years) were selected based on exclude and include criteria and randomly divided into three groups of 12, A-tDCS-Mindfulness, sham-tDCS-Mindfulness (five sessions), and control. The Edinburgh Hand Test was used to determine the dominant hemisphere of the brain. The Computerized Stroop Test was used to measure selective attention capacity. Nonparametric Wilcoxon, Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney U tests were used.Results: The results showed that the within-group changes in both A-tDCS and sham-tDCS mindfulness groups, it was able to have a significant improvement on the Stroop test score and time of interference. In the comparison between groups effect, it was also found that there is a significant difference in time and score between the three groups, and respectively, the A-tDCS mindfulness, sham-tDCS mindfulness and the control group had the best performance. Based on the results of the present research, it was found that the presentation of A-tDCS mindfulness can be more effective on the time and score of selective attention of badminton players.Conclusion: Results suggest that the use of tDCS along with mindfulness can improve selective attention in badminton players.

The present article aims to analyze Ann Pancake’s Strange as this Weather Has Been through the lens of ecofeminist theories. The study explores the connections between women and nature by focusing on three key areas: inherent affinity and dualism, agency and intrinsic values, and conflict with technology. The article addresses how the novel expresses and upholds ecofeminist concepts and how the female characters challenge the male-dominated power structure by participating in the ecofeminist movement through their actions and words as Earth's guardians. Greta Gaard’s ecofeminist ideas form the theoretical foundation of this research. The article highlights how the primary female characters in the novel exhibit a profound bond with their land and work to safeguard it as guardians of the Earth, embodying resilience, empowerment, and an enduring spirit, and manifest self-confidence and a deep connection with nature. Through this affinity, they portray a sense of belonging and identity with nature. It laments that technology, which is manipulated in capitalist and patriarchal ideologies, treats nature merely as a commodity. The narrative also showcases and criticizes the dire environmental and societal consequences of mountaintop removal mining as a harmful technological practice in Appalachia, which, on a macro level, stands for the world.

This paper aims to analyze Doris Lessing's narrative techniques to explore how she developed the discourse of her stories and depicted her contemporary realities in her story worlds. It seeks to address the question of whether there is a relationship between her real world and her storytelling, and whether her ideology and personal background influenced her narrative approach. To accomplish this goal, we will analyze the novels The Grass is Singing and Martha Quest using Gavin's Text World Theory, a cognitive approach that provides a framework encompassing three levels of analysis: Discourse World, Text World, and Sub-Worlds. Our analysis reveals that the discourse of her stories closely mirrors her real-life discourse, indicating a direct relationship between her real worlds and her storytelling. Lessing’s intricate descriptions of world-building elements, such as time, locations, characters, objects, and actions within the story, serve to advance the narrative forward through both material and existential processes. Moreover, her use of sub-worlds to express her yearning for freedom and justice reflects her critical viewpoints on the oppressive systems prevalent in her time, particularly colonization and racial issues. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that from 1944 to 1956, her storytelling method was influenced by her communist ideology. In essence, the concepts and themes represented in her stories emerge as reflections of her real-world experiences, effectively conveyed through her narrative techniques.

The present paper deals with the historical overview and the reception of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets in contemporary Iran. The authors examine the chronology of Persian translations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (both scattered and book-length ones) during a century which is a considerable period of time in the examination of the reception of any author in another culture. As poetry is not the most popular genre in Persian translation, the Persian translations of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets suffered from a lot of fluctuations. It was in the latter part of the nineteenth century, a turning-point in the history of the country, that Shakespeare was introduced into Iranian audience for the first time. It started with scattered translations and ended in book-length ones. This study indicates early Persian interest in Shakespeare’s Sonnets which was followed by a lull. The reason behind it was two-fold: the translation of foreign poetry was dominated by French and Russian languages, and the rich tradition of Persian poetry does not feel the need to translate foreign poetry. The reception of Shakespeare’s Sonnets was followed by renewed interest in 1998-2017 and finally book-length translations began to thrive. All in all, Shakespeare’s Sonnets did not have a great influence on Persian poetry, as it was expected.

In the immigration studies, the diasporic female experiences are not indicatively considered as the prevailing experiences of immigrant men who are claimed to stand for all immigrants. Thus, it is challenging to examine female migration experiences and the consequences that are ignored. This article explores the ignored parts of female migration experiences as subalterns and focuses on the process of assimilation in the host country following theories of Gayatri Spivak’s post-colonialism. In the age of migration the female characters of the former colonies are being culturally hybridized when they get in touch with the Western factors. That hybridity and their ambivalent attitude between the cultures, they are becoming the mimic women that has not only affected them and led them to identity crisis but also contributed to the dangling of them between cultures lost and confused. This article will carefully examine the consequences of assimilation of the female character, Mumtaz, in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke in the hybridized atmosphere. Moth Smoke is the debut novel by British Pakistani novelist, Mohsin Hamid, which provides the context for the clash of cultures in its portrait of a country violently divided against itself. Sometimes, assimilation with host cultures are to the extent that the female immigrant becomes baffled and confounded. With shattered identity, she is neither a modern Westernized woman nor an Eastern glorified mother and wife.